Chunxiuzi Liu

Xuebin Wang, Chunxiuzi Liu, Meng Zhao et al.

This study introduces an artificial neural network (ANN) for image classification task, inspired by the aversive olfactory learning circuits of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). Despite the remarkable performance of ANNs in a variety of tasks, they face challenges such as excessive parameterization, high training costs and limited generalization capabilities. C. elegans, with its simple nervous system comprising only 302 neurons, serves as a paradigm in neurobiological research and is capable of complex behaviors including learning. This research identifies key neural circuits associated with aversive olfactory learning in C. elegans through behavioral experiments and high-throughput gene sequencing, translating them into an image classification ANN architecture. Additionally, two other image classification ANNs with distinct architectures were constructed for comparative performance analysis to highlight the advantages of bio-inspired design. The results indicate that the ANN inspired by the aversive olfactory learning circuits of C. elegans achieves higher accuracy, better consistency and faster convergence rates in image classification task, especially when tackling more complex classification challenges. This study not only showcases the potential of bio-inspired design in enhancing ANN capabilities but also provides a novel perspective and methodology for future ANN design.

Jiantao Wu, Lin Wang, Bo Yang et al.

Disentanglement is a highly desirable property of representation owing to its similarity to human understanding and reasoning. Many works achieve disentanglement upon information bottlenecks (IB). Despite their elegant mathematical foundations, the IB branch usually exhibits lower performance. In order to provide an insight into the problem, we develop an annealing test to calculate the information freezing point (IFP), which is a transition state to freeze information into the latent variables. We also explore these clues or inductive biases for separating the entangled factors according to the differences in the IFP distributions. We found the existing approaches suffer from the information diffusion problem, according to which the increased information diffuses in all latent variables. Based on this insight, we propose a novel disentanglement framework, termed the distilling entangled factor (DEFT), to address the information diffusion problem by scaling backward information. DEFT applies a multistage training strategy, including multigroup encoders with different learning rates and piecewise disentanglement pressure, to disentangle the factors stage by stage. We evaluate DEFT on three variants of dSprite and SmallNORB, which show low-variance and high-level disentanglement scores. Furthermore, the experiment under the correlative factors shows incapable of TC-based approaches. DEFT also exhibits a competitive performance in the unsupervised setting.

Chunxiuzi Liu, Fengyang Sun, Qingrui Ni et al.

Classical benchmark problems utilize multiple transformation techniques to increase optimization difficulty, e.g., shift for anti centering effect and rotation for anti dimension sensitivity. Despite testing the transformation invariance, however, such operations do not really change the landscape's "shape", but rather than change the "view point". For instance, after rotated, ill conditional problems are turned around in terms of orientation but still keep proportional components, which, to some extent, does not create much obstacle in optimization. In this paper, inspired from image processing, we investigate a novel graphic conformal mapping transformation on benchmark problems to deform the function shape. The bending operation does not alter the function basic properties, e.g., a unimodal function can almost maintain its unimodality after bent, but can modify the shape of interested area in the search space. Experiments indicate the same optimizer spends more search budget and encounter more failures on the conformal bent functions than the rotated version. Several parameters of the proposed function are also analyzed to reveal performance sensitivity of the evolutionary algorithms.